The People He's Killed
by nicnac918
Summary: "Harry Potter doesn't know any more how many people he's killed." An introspective piece if Harry was a little less well adjusted than he let on.


Harry Potter doesn't know any more how many people he's killed. Even if he's never held a wand to someone's head, never said those two words and watched a flash of green steal the light from their eyes, he's still killed them. They are all dead and it is his fault and he killed them. On his dark days he has moments where he thinks he really has killed them all, even if some of them don't know it yet. They're all dead and gone and the only one left is him, watching the life's blood roll of his hands.

He doesn't remember the first two people he killed. Hardly surprising, since most one year-olds don't know what death is, much less comprehend killing someone. And in the end Harry really was just an average baby, aside from the fact he was a murderer. He didn't even know it was his fault until much later, when he was fifteen and heard the prophecy. That's when he knew it was his fault they were gone, he killed his parents. On his bad days he wonders if this makes him more evil than Voldemort. After all Tom was seventeen when he killed his dad and Harry was only one.

For the ten whole years he spends with the Dursleys he never kills anyone. He is unwanted and unloved, but he never kills anyone and looking back now he can't help but miss those days. He wonders sometimes if his relative knew what he really was, what he was capable of. On what he likes to pretend are his good days he decides that they did know, that all the neglect and vitriol were only there to stop him. To keep him from killing. Harry has learned that denial is what you make of it.

The next time he kills someone he is eleven. He puts his hands to Quirrell's face and burns the skin away and it hurts. Deep inside a little voice wonders if he is dying and does it always hurt so much? It isn't until later he finds out that instead of dying he was killing and it usually hurts worse. On his quiet days he likes to think of Quirrell and what kind of man he would be without Voldemort. He wonders if Quirrell would have been a good Defense Against the Dark Arts Professor if he didn't have to act so afraid and if Harry might have looked up to the man. But in the end he'll never know.

Another three years pass before he kills again. Sometimes when he closes his eyes he can see Cedric's own wide, sightless eyes staring back, his face forever frozen between confusion and fear. He sees them and he knows that Cedric would still be alive if he were more selfish. On his happiest days he can remember Cedric the way he was before, loyal and hard-working and brave and clever and cunning and ambitious and all the other bits of Hogwarts rolled together. Those days don't come often.

This time it only takes him a year to kill someone else and a morbid voice in the back of his mind wonders if he's getting better at this. It's hard to believe Sirius is dead, harder than the others. He was so alive and blazing, only instants before Harry killed him, sometimes Harry can't make the two scenes fit together, like a trick puzzle that needs just the right twist to force the pieces next to each other. On his angriest days his can almost blame someone else, Bellatrix or Kreacher or Snape or even Sirius. But even through the haze of anger Harry still can't quite forget that he's the one that killed his godfather.

He finds himself extremely grateful on his busiest days, because then he only has to see the crumpled body at the bottom of the Astronomy Tower once or maybe twice the whole day long. He remembers seeing the corpse of the man Harry always thought of as the most powerful wizard to live for the first time and hearing that morbid little voice say that now he knows he's getting better at this, getting better at killing. And he tries to remember if that was his first thought when he saw the body of Albus Dumbledore, and wonders if that means he's crazy.

After Dumbledore dies people begin falling like leaves in autumn, and Harry thinks that maybe the Dursleys aren't the only ones who knew that he was a killer. On his sensible days he knows that that can't be true, Dumbledore didn't know, why would he have let Harry into Hogwarts to kill of those people in that case, but it's hard to be sensible all the time. He remembers the way Hedwig and Moody and Dobby died trying to protect him and thinks it's a wonder anything is sensible at all.

The way he killed Peter Pettigrew always seems a little funny to him, both strange and laughable at the same time, since he did it by saving his life. On his actual good days he tries to convince himself that there was some sort of cosmic balance involved, that he didn't kill Wormtail like he killed the others, only delayed the inevitable. And sometimes he almost even believes it. Almost.

The death of Severus Snape is a puzzle to him, a riddle he can't quite find the answer to. Because Harry knows he must have killed him, knows it like he knows his name, like he knows the back of his hand, like he knows he's a murderer. But no matter how much he tries he just can't figure out how. On his slowest days he turns it over and over in his head for hours, like a Rubik's cube he can't seem to solve. Sometimes he thinks he has the answer when he remembers the way the man swore to protect him, but then he remembers that Snape didn't really die to protect him. Snape died over a fight for a stick, a stupid piece of wood. And he thinks about it more and more, trying to find out how he did it. But the in the end it doesn't really matter all that much, because he knows it's his fault. It always is.

It's on his guilty days, which are most of them, that he thinks about all the rest who died. The ones who Harry killed because he wasn't quick enough or clever enough or strong enough or _good_ enough to stop Voldemort sooner. He remembers Fred and Colin and Remus and Tonks and Ted and Scrimgeour and Charity Burbage and Bathilda Bagshot and Crabbe and Bellatrix and Gregorovitch and Grindelwald and all of the others whose names run a steady march through his mind, and he knows their deaths are his fault, he killed every single one of them.

The last person he's killed, whose death weighs on him, is one he knows people will think he's crazy for feeling guilty for. But it's the hardest one to bear, because he did it on purpose. He might not have been the one to actually utter the Killing Curse, but he had every intention of murdering Voldemort that day. And on his worst days he can't remember which one of them had the blood-red eyes.

So in the morning, after Harry makes his silent litany of the death he's left in his wake he'll open his eyes and smile at his wife. He'll kiss her good morning, then go downstairs and smile at his children and tousle their hair, never letting any of them see the way he lives each day with a sort of quiet desperation. And on every single day he'll smile at all the people in his life as he wonders how much time they have left together before he manages to kill them too.


End file.
